While the elite of the Interdependency were making their plans to abandon the common people to their fate, the common people of the Interdependency were beginning to come to grips with what, exactly, that fate actually was.
Listen to me or don’t. But if you don’t, you’ll be dead. And then where will you be? Dead, that’s where.
It’s the truth.” “Oh, my daughter,” Huma said, and smiled. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how little that actually means.
This is what happens when the Narrative takes over. Things quit making sense. The laws of physics take a coffee break. People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically.
I had been getting sidetracked by the idea that an entire fearsome race of aliens had given themselves goofy names because of the names I had thoughtlessly given two of them more than a decade before;.
But imagine you’re a tapeworm, and then suddenly you’re Goethe. It’s like that.
Who are you, who is so wise in the way of alien fungus?
There’s no but. You’re right. It’s just a reminder that war favors the rich. The ones who can leave, do. The ones who can’t, suffer.
Simply put, she was the one who had to put up with me. That she did so with love and patience and encouragement instead of strangling me, throwing my remains into a wood chipper, and then pretending she had never been married to me at all is a testament to the fact that she is, in fact, the single best person I know.
Maybe after the first dozen times it happened, the Universal Union should have started engineering for space defenestration. NICK.
But we get to live as long as we’re useful. And that is a rare privilege.
Now What?” Kerensky said. “We wait,” Dahl said. “For how long?” Kerensky said, ” As long as dramatically appropriate,” Dahl said.
Whether they are up to our standards or not, the fact remains: We need more crew.
I don’t have a problem with treason,” I said. “I can stop anytime.” I.
Hickory, have you ever lied to me?” I asked. “I do not believe you are aware of me or any Obin ever lying to you,” Hickory said.
Realborn go for years without the slightest clue what they’re going to do with themselves. From what I understand, some of them never actually figure it out. They just walk through life in a daze and then fall into their graves at the end of it.
That’s the point of rumors. They’re not based on anything, so nothing is very effective against them. Truth is no defense, and the people fielding these rumors know it.
Making people change because you can’t deal with who they are isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. What needs to be done is for people to pull their heads out of their asses.
They found no colonists, but they found parts of them. And a lot of blood.
She had the expression of the cat who ate the canary and then threw it up in her owner’s favorite shoes.
Yes. The one advantage we had, which is a thing I brought to the enterprise, was the understanding that the plan was not the goal. The goal was the goal, and we were going to get to it however we could. And if it meant changing our plans, sometimes in the middle of executing them, then we would.